What questions do you bring to reading a document
like this?
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What are some of the things
you learn by reading this inventory?
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How does one try to contextualize the material objects that
are represented in the inventory?
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What things would you want to know that you can't learn from just reading
the inventory?
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Barbara Clark Smith is Curator of Social History at the Smithsonian's
National Museum of American History, where she has worked since 1983.
Her research ranges from the material culture of household life to forms
of popular participation in the era of the American Revolution. Dr. Smith
has curated exhibitions on such topics as household and community life
in the early republic, costume and the construction of gender, and the
history of housework. Her publications include After the Revolution:
The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century;
"Food Rioters and the American Revolution," William and
Mary Quarterly, (1994); and "Revolution in Boston," for
the National Park Service handbook for the Freedom Trail.